A Three-Dimensional Model of the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster

During the spring of 2001 (during my freshman year at Cornell University), I spent some time working with Martha Haynes on modeling the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster using survey data containing positions and spectroscopic redshifts of 2380 galaxies in this region. While the distance to a galaxy is normally determined as a linear function of redshift (Hubble's Law), the orbital motion of galaxies in clusters introduced unacceptable errors in this method that distort the clusters on x-y-redshift plots into long fingers along the line of sight. I worked on developing a program to automatically recognize such candidate clusters in the data set and identify the galaxies inside of it for later analysis.